I have taught them several of the pretty songs; you should hear their

piping voices--and with their picture books and their gardens, they are

very busy and happy indeed.

Their mother is positively illumined by the change her young folks.

Never in her life has she seen any country but this one of charred

pines and sand. I find her bending over the Cinderella book, liking

it, and liking the children's little gardens.

"We ain't never had no flower garden," she confided to me. "Jim he

ain't had time, and I ain't had time, and I ain't never had no luck

nohow."

But the boy still means the most to me. And you have found the reason.

It isn't what I am doing for him, it is what he is doing for me. If

you could see his eyes! They are a boy's eyes now, not those of a

little wild animal. He is beginning to read the simple books you sent.

We began with "Mother Goose," and I gave him first "The King of France

and Forty Thousand Men." The "Oranges and Lemons" song carried on the

Dick Whittington atmosphere which he had liked in my poem, with its

bells of Old Bailey and Shoreditch. He'll know his London before I get

through with him.

But we've struck even a deeper note. One Sunday I was moved to take

out with me your father's old Bible. There's a rose between its

leaves, kept for a talisman against the blue devils which sometimes get

me in their grip. Well, I took the old Bible out to our little

amphitheater in the pines, and read, what do you think? Not the Old

Testament stories.

I read the Beatitudes, and my boy listened, and when I had finished, he

asked, "What is blessed? And who said that?"

I told him, and brought back to myself in the telling the vision of

myself as a boy. Oh, how far I have drifted from the dreams of that

boy! And if it had not been for you I should never have turned back.

And now this boy in the pines, and the boy who was I are learning

together, step by step. I am trying to forget the years between. I am

trying to take up life where it was before I was overthrown. I can't

quite get hold of things yet as a man, for when I try, I feel a man's

bitterness. But the boy believes, and I have shut the man in me away,

until the boy grows up.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024